President Donald Trump news today: Former fixer Michael Cohen settles lawsuit over unpaid legal fees

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NEW YORK — Donald Trump’s company and his former longtime lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen have settled a lawsuit over Cohen’s claim that he was unfairly stuck with huge legal fees after being embroiled in investigations into the former president.

Attorneys for both sides told the judge they reached an agreement in a video conference Friday in Manhattan, when Cohen’s 2019 case was scheduled to go to trial Monday in a state court. Details of the agreement were not made public.

Cohen said Friday that the matter was “resolved in a manner satisfactory to all parties.” Messages seeking comment were left with lawyers for Trump’s company, the Trump Organization.

Cohen claimed in his lawsuit that the Trump Organization promised to pay his legal expenses and did so over a period of time, totaling more than $1.7 million in legal fees.

But, Cohen said, the company backtracked after he began cooperating with federal prosecutors in their investigations related to Trump’s business dealings with Russia and attempts to silence women with embarrassing stories about his personal life.

Cohen’s lawyers stopped representing him after the company stopped paying. His lawsuit said that harmed his ability to respond to federal investigations.

In court papers, the Trump Organization argued that it had made certain promises and said it had met any obligations it had. The company also argued that Cohen’s involvement in the federal investigations was not a result of his former employment but rather a personal decision to try to reduce his own criminal legal exposure as an indictment.

RELATED: Judge sets trial date for next May in Trump classified documents case in Florida

Jury selection in the case began Monday, with a trial scheduled for next week. Among prospective jurors, more than half said they had a strong opinion of Trump, the front-runner in the 2024 Republican presidential primary. Many said their feelings for him were strong enough that they were unable to fairly evaluate the evidence.

While the former president will not be a witness at trial, his son, Donald Trump Jr. is expected to testify.

Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to multiple charges, admitting he lied to Congress, violated campaign finance laws by making excessive political contributions, lied to multiple banks to obtain financing and evaded income taxes by failing to report more than $4 million in income. He was sentenced to three years in prison, although he served nearly two-thirds of it at home, released after the outbreak of COVID-19 overwhelmed the country’s prisons.

He then became a key witness in the New York grand jury proceeding that led to Trump’s indictment in April on charges of falsifying Trump Organization records to protect Trump’s 2016 candidacy by suppressing claims that he had extramarital sexual encounters.

Trump has denied those encounters, and has pleaded not guilty to criminal charges. He cast the case as an attempt by a Democratic district attorney to derail his ongoing campaign to return to the White House in 2025.

Trump has now sued Cohen, accusing him of violating a corporate confidentiality agreement, violating ethical standards for lawyers and maliciously “spreading lies” about Trump. A Cohen spokesman, attorney Lanny Davis, responded that Trump was abusing the legal system to harass Cohen.

Associated Press writers Michael R. Sisak and Jake Offenhartz contributed to this report.

The video in the player above is from an earlier report.

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